connector

The Apple MagSafe power connector is long gone from their product line, but that doesn’t mean that magnetic connectors aren’t without their charms. It just takes the right application, and finding one might be easier with these homebrew magnetic connectors.

We’ll admit that the application that [Wesley Lee] found for his magnetic connectors is perhaps a little odd. He’s building something called Linobyte, a hybrid art and electronics project that pays homage to computing history with very high-style, interactive core memory modules. The connectors are for the sense wire that is weaved through the eight toroids on each module, to program it with a single byte. Each connector has a 3D-printed boot that holds a small, gold-plated neodymium magnet with the sense wire soldered to it. A socket holds another magnet to the underside of a PCB. The magnet in the boot sticks to the PCB and makes contact with pads, completing the circuit. We know what you’re thinking: heating a magnet past the Curie point is a great way to ruin it. [Wesley] admits that happens, but it just makes the connection a little weaker, which works for his application. The short video below shows how he puts them together.

When I started working in a video production house in the early 1980s, it quickly became apparent that there was a lot of snobbery in terms of equipment. These were the days when the home video market was taking off; the Format War had been fought and won by VHS, and consumer-grade VCRs were flying off the shelves and into living rooms. Most of that gear was cheap stuff, built to a price point and destined to fail sooner rather than later, like most consumer gear. In our shop, surrounded by our Ikegami cameras and Sony 3/4″ tape decks, we derided this equipment as “ReggieVision” gear. We were young.

For me, one thing that set pro gear apart from the consumer stuff was the type of connectors it had on the back panel. If a VCR had only the bog-standard F-connectors like those found on cable TV boxes along with RCA jacks for video in and out, I knew it was junk. To impress me, it had to have BNC connectors; that was the hallmark of pro-grade gear.

I may have been snooty, but I wasn’t really wrong. A look at coaxial connectors in general and the design decisions that went into the now-familiar BNC connector offers some insight into why my snobbery was at least partially justified.

They adorn the ends of Cat5 network patch cables and the flat satin cables that come with all-in-one printers that we generally either toss in the scrap bin or throw away altogether. The blocky rectangular plugs, molded of clear plastic and holding gold-plated contacts, are known broadly as modular connectors. They and their socket counterparts have become ubiquitous components of the connected world over the last half-century or so, and unsurprisingly they had their start where so many other innovations began: from the need to manage the growth of the telephone network and reduce costs. Here’s how the modular connector got that way.

The MIDI spec was released in 1983, and for more than thirty years every synthesizer, drum machine, and piece of computer hardware with MIDI has sported an enormous DIN-5 jack on the back. Why did they choose such a large connector? Well, MiniDIN connectors hadn’t even been invented yet, and today even MiniDIN connectors are rarely-seen, obsolete connectors.

In the last decade, MIDI has found its way into some very small machines. Those Pocket Operators have MIDI sync, you can control a Game Boy with MIDI using the right hardware, and the cute little Korg synths also have MIDI tucked away in there somewhere. You can’t put a DIN-5 jack on those things, leading to some weird implementations of MIDI over non-standard connectors.

Although there are five connectors in a DIN-5 jack, most implementations use only two connectors to send and receive data. Synth manufacturers have capitalized on this fact and cheap TRS connectors to build their own implementation of MIDI using smaller connectors, sometimes with incompatable pinouts.

Now, though, there’s a standard. For TRS connectors, the tip is pin 5 on the DIN-5, the ring is pin 4, and the sleeve is pin 2. It sends and receives data to synths and drum machines from 1983, and it doesn’t use gigantic connectors.

The only caveats to the new MIDI standard is that 2.5mm TRS connectors are recommended, and that protection circuitry is strongly recommended in the case a headphone driver is inevitably connected to a MIDI device. Other than that, everything’s coming up roses, and this opens up the door to MIDI jacks that are much, much easier to source.

Right now, if you happen to be in Noth America, chances are pretty good that there’s at least one little face staring at you. Look around and you’ll spy it, probably about 15 inches up from the floor on a nearby wall. It’s the ubiquitous wall outlet, with three holes arranged in a way that can’t help but stimulate the facial recognition firmware of our mammalian brain.

No matter where you go you’ll find those outlets and similar ones, all engineered for specific tasks. But why do they look the way they do? And what’s going on electrically and mechanically behind that familiar plastic face? It’s a topic we’ve touched on before with Jenny List’s take on international mains standards. Now it’s time to take a look inside the common North American wall socket, and how it got that way.

Just because something is “never used” doesn’t mean it’s good. [Inkoo Vintage Computing] learned that lesson while trying to repair an Amiga 500 and finding parts online that were claimed to be “new” in that they were old stock that had never been used. The problem was that in the last 30 years the capacitors had dried out, rendering these parts essentially worthless. The solution, though, was to adapt a modern PSU for use on the old equipment.

The first hurdle to getting this machine running again was finding the connector for the power supply. The parts seemed to have vanished, with some people making their own from scratch. But after considering the problem for a minute longer they realized that another Commodore machine used the same parts, and were able to source a proper cable.

Many more parts had to be sourced to get the power supply operational, but these were not as hard to come across. After some dedicated work with the soldering iron, the power supply was put to use running the old Amiga. Asture readers will know that [Inkoo Vintage Computing] aren’t strangers to the Amiga. They recently were featured with a nondestructive memory module hack that suffered from the same parts sourcing issues that this modification had, but also came out wonderfully in the end.

When reading about cool projects and products, it’s common to see wiring plugs labelled “JST connector.” This looks fine until we start getting hands-on and begin hacking things together. Inevitably we find the JST connector from one part fails to fit in the JST connector of another. This is the moment we learn “JST” is not a connector specification. It is short for Japan Solderless Terminals Manufacturing Company, Ltd. A company whose history goes back to 1957 and their website (styled in 1999) lists hundreds of different types.

We can simplify to “JST connector” when chit-chatting about projects. But when it comes to actual hardware specification, that’s not good enough. Which JST connector?